Under the headline ‘The Dead Rabbits Immortalised’, the New York Evening Post reported on 10 July 1857 that a one-penny song sheet was selling feverishly ‘in the lower part of the city’. Written by ‘Saugerties Bard’ and to be sung to the popular Dan Emmett minstrel tune ‘Jordan’, it began:
They had a dreadful fight upon last Saturday night, The papers gave the news accordin’; Guns, pistols, clubs and sticks, hot water and old bricks, Which drove them on the other side of Jordan. Then pull off the coat and roll up the sleeve, For Bayard is a hard street to travel; So pull off the coat and roll up the sleeve, The Bloody Sixth is a hard ward to travel I believe.
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Joshua Brown directs the American Social History Project at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life and the Crisis of Gilded Age America.
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